Publisher:
Medium: Print, hardcover
Rating: ⭐⭐*
Blurb: For Penny Lee high school was a total non-event. Her friends were okay, her grades were fine, and while she somehow managed to land a boyfriend, he doesn’t actually know anything about her. When Penny heads to college in Austin, Texas, to learn how to become a writer, it’s seventy-nine miles and a zillion light years away from everything she can’t wait to leave behind.
Sam’s stuck. Literally, figuratively, emotionally, financially. He works at a café and sleeps there too, on a mattress on the floor of an empty storage room upstairs. He knows that this is the god-awful chapter of his life that will serve as inspiration for when he’s a famous movie director but right this second the seventeen bucks in his checking account and his dying laptop are really testing him.
When Sam and Penny cross paths it’s less meet-cute and more a collision of unbearable awkwardness. Still, they swap numbers and stay in touch—via text—and soon become digitally inseparable, sharing their deepest anxieties and secret dreams without the humiliating weirdness of having to see each other.
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*My actual rating is 2.5.
So, I started this book at the beginning of May and I finished it only a few days ago. Here are my thoughts.
The good things about this book:
- Background: I’ve read a couple of reviews on Goodreads about how some people disliked how long it got until Penny (the main female character) and Sam (the main male character) finally entered the “emergency contact” stage. I liked that it showed Penny and Sam’s lives before they got to know each other, and I liked the double meaning of “emergency contact.”
- Penny: I liked that Penny was a writer! As someone who went to school for Creative Writing, I definitely understand the issues that Penny had when writing and the struggles of trying to get to the point of the story. I also loved that she was fangirling over her teacher, who was an author that had a bestselling book.
- Character: this book is character-driven rather than plot-driven, and I appreciate that. It was nice reading a story mainly about the characters rather than the plot.
The bad/not-so-cool things:
- The direction: For a long time, I didn’t know where this story was going. What was the point of it? Is there going to be romance or is it genuine friendship? (Spoiler alert: it’s not friendship.) It seemed that there was no buildup or consequence even at the end of the book.
- Sam/Penny dynamics: I didn’t like the relationship between Sam and Penny. I would have preferred if they had stayed friends rather than the eventual outcome (which is left open-ended) and I wished that they had grown a bit more rather than just staying stagnant. At one point I actually forgot Sam’s name.
- Text-speak: call me pretentious, but I hate when I’m texting and someone doesn’t use full words. Most people I know tend to type out full sentences, but I understand that for me, it’s just a personal preference. I wouldn’t really fault anyone on it, though.
Now for what bothered me the most:
Sam and Penny’s relationship.
My whole issue with this is that they are two people who are at two different places in their lives. Penny is eighteen and a freshman in college. Sam is twenty-one and he lives above his job and has an on-off girlfriend.
I didn’t want them to get together. I wanted Penny to live her life and not become obsessed with a guy three years her senior, and I wanted Sam to get some help–possibly therapy–and get out of the situation that he’s in.
I was concerned about Sam using Penny as a pseudo-therapist because the issues that Sam has is a lot for an eighteen-year-old girl that just started at a new school. He has a lot to unpack, and although Penny is a great listener, she is in no way qualified to help him. She has a lot of problems of her own. Sam goes through ups and downs throughout the book and it seems as if he needs a better support system and a drive to better himself.
With Penny…*sigh*. I don’t care for Penny. Reading from her perspective was nice at one point, but she’s very negative and because of where I am in my life and how I am, I don’t need the negativity that she reinforces on almost every page. She ignores her mother’s attempts at contact and doesn’t try to do new things. She’s just stagnant. There was a character in the book other than Penny and Sam that I could potentially see Penny with, but that was shot down pretty quickly when Penny made no mention of him after two or so chapters.
There’s also a part in Penny’s chapter where her roommate, Jude (who is Sam’s niece through his mother’s unsuccessful marriage), implies that she’s worried about Sam and that she wishes he would talk to her. At this point, Penny has been talking to Sam for a while and hasn’t told Jude. I think that Penny is in a “honeymoon crush phase,” where she isn’t listening to reason or to people close to her. Jude had commented on Sam’s weight and instead of looking deeper into the situation or asking Sam if there’s anything wrong, Penny just thinks that there’s nothing wrong with Sam, that he’s dreamy. It angered me and I went on an entire rant in a notebook.
All in all, I didn’t care for this book. It was a great way to pass the time and I was intrigued enough to read it, but Penny and Sam’s actions annoyed me in various parts of the book and I was ready for it to end. There were also no consequences to any of the actions that the two characters did. There was no real climax either, and I found the book lacking.
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